Hillary Clinton Is Held to a Higher Standard on Race Because She's a Woman

The #WhichHillary hashtag questions whether Clinton has really changed in 20 years, but the same could be asked of Bernie Sanders.

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By
Brittney Cooper

Feb 29, 2016

Like many left-radical voters during this election season, I find myself conflicted. I like Hillary Clinton and unequivocally think she is the most qualified candidate to sit at the head of American empire. But my like for her has far less to do with policy and far more to do with something more ephemeral and affective. I like bawse chicks and badass women. I like a woman who can roll into a room full of ego-driven, testosterone-fueled dudes, and tango like she was born for it. Call it the feminist in me. Call it the badass in me. I see this in Hillary and game recognize game.

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But in my everyday life, as both a scholar and an activist, I know that many of the policies that Hillary Clinton has supported are not wholly tenable with the radical vision I have for a world in which black children don't fear the police, in which all black children have access to good public schools, in which all American children have access to a good college education, and in which there is a robust social safety net to support the hardworking, working-class members of our society.

When Hillary Clinton called black children who had been swept up in gang activity "super predators" in 1996, she participated in and perpetuated an insidious, racist narrative trumped up by both the right and the left to form a political allegiance at the expense of the most vulnerable folks in African-American communities. A high school student at the time, I was completely unaware and entirely caught up in Bill Clinton's mystique. If you ask my mother today about Bill Clinton, she will say simply, "I had a good job and I made good money when Bill Clinton was president."

When folks wonder why many African-American women of my mother's generation come out to support Hillary Clinton in droves, they should perhaps begin there, back in the mid-'90s when the brief economic boom under Bill Clinton made a tangible difference in the lives of many working-class and middle-class black women. At the same time that he gutted the prospects of women on welfare, his economic policies created tangible benefits for women like my mother who were not on welfare but who certainly lived paycheck-to-paycheck.

In South Carolina this week, Hillary Clinton routed Bernie Sanders, 74 percent to 26 percent. Among black voters, that margin was even starker at 86 percent to 14 percent. She won 74 percent of women; she won white voters; and she won blacks over 30 at a rate of 96 percent.

There is far more ambivalence about her with the under-30 black crowd, and significant disavowals of her among black academics like Michelle Alexander and Cornel West.

I get it. When I watched video of her unflinchingly referring to African-American youth as "super predators" while standing in her neatly coiffed blonde bob, I recognized that her very embodiment as a white woman making claims about the extreme violence of African-American youth and the need to "bring them to heel" played into age-old white fears about violent black masculine "thugs."

Black people around my age have most acutely felt the effects of that 1994 crime bill, with its advocacy for mandatory minimums and three-strikes penalties. That bill came into existence just as late Generation X-ers and early Millennials were coming of age. It extracted a whole generation of young black men from our communities. Sometimes I joke that Bill Clinton's policies may have as much to do with my challenges in finding a romantic partner as any personal failings on my part. But mostly, I'm not joking. Bill Clinton's policies gutted not just the economic life of black communities, but the familial and intimate lives of our communities as well.

And Hillary Clinton participated by wielding the social capital of white womanhood to justify a narrative of predatory black youth who merited the creation of a whole prison industrial complex to contain them. With 20 years of hindsight, thinking about the way Bill Clinton's policies have affected my own family and the broader African-American community feels like a sucker punch, from which we are all still staggering, trying to catch our breath.

And yet, we all know the story is more complicated than this. Hillary Clinton did not engineer the prison industrial complex. She was not even one of its key architects. She was one of its champions, but then, many black politicians of the era were as well.

So I understand and agree with attempts by Black Lives Matter activists to "bring her to heel" as it were, to force her to stand flat-footed and apologize for the ways that she perpetuated a narrative and set of social consequences that we are all living with today. But I'm going to need that apology from Bernie Sanders as well, since he voted for this bill.

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Combating racism is never an excuse to perpetuate sexism.

Sanders claims he voted for the '94 crime bill because it provided needed protections for women combating intimate partner violence. And though he spoke out about the social causes of crime during deliberations, he neglected to make explicit mention of the way tough-on-crime policies were racially loaded and ultimately voted for a set of provisions that would disproportionately harm poor communities of color. Thus, we have allowed Sanders's "benign racism" to go unchecked, because his support of women seemed to justify it at the time. The reality is that Clinton's logic was not far from Sanders's. Using her white womanhood as the backdrop to advocate for locking up "super predators" was itself a call to protect white womanhood at the expense of black communities. Did not Sanders's choice to advocate for women while gutting black communities effectively do the same, despite his intentions or reservations? Combating sexism is never an excuse to engage in rampant racism, and the idea that all women would benefit from a bill that simultaneously demolished the communities and support networks of women of color seems misguided.

The corollary here is also true: Combating racism is never an excuse to perpetuate sexism. And acting as though Hillary Clinton is one and the same as Bill Clinton is sexism. If this election is going to become a reckoning with and rejection of the political paradigm of Clintonism, then we must hold all parties accountable for the ways they perpetuated that narrative.

Still, I agree that Hillary Clinton is worthy of deep skepticism. When video was released of her interaction last week with activist Ashley Williams, who demanded an apology for the "super predator" remarks, Clinton became defensive, jabbing her finger at Williams and communicating non-verbally that she was hella annoyed at this black girl for disrupting her discussion of the "issues." This interaction prompted the #WhichHillary hashtag, as folks expressed their disbelief that the Hillary of 2016 is much changed from the Hillary of 1996. I think it is fair to say that Clinton probably hasn't changed much. While I think it is credible to believe that she now recognizes the problem with calling black youth super predators, and I can even believe that she doesn't think of the vast majority of black youth as super predators, I also believe that Hillary Clinton is responsive to black concerns only because she is being pushed, and not because she inherently is an advocate for black lives.

But then, I don't believe anything different about Sanders. He knows he has a fighting chance only if he can galvanize some of the youthful and revolutionary spirit of Black Lives Matter activists and left-radical black folks. So he has gotten his language and his rhetoric together. But lest memory fail to serve us, Sanders was completely nonplussed when initially confronted by Black Lives Matter activists, as well.

If you can't tell, I'm still working through my views on this election. I think Hillary Clinton is who she is — a consummate politician. I believe that HRC became the consummate candidate she needed to become to win the American presidency. And I believe that if she were a man, we would respect her level of political acumen as a "necessary evil," and call her reserved, fairly conservative public style "sensible."

I have not decided who I will vote for, because I like to think of myself as one driven by arguments and best policy options, rather than by personality. I also personally abhor the ways that Hillary Clinton has deployed her white womanhood on racial matters in the public sphere. But I'm equally uncomfortable with the ways that Bernie Sanders's long history of having a largely race-blind class analysis is being overlooked because he has now decided to use better rhetoric.

The part of me that grew up primarily having white girls for friends learned a long time ago to recognize that white people are in many cases a mixed bag. The same girl who said to me that "black and white people should marry their own kind" was my best friend for many of my formative years. The same boy who told me that "black people do run down our property values when they move into the neighborhood" is someone I treated as a little brother for many years. Perhaps then, I have become exceedingly good in the worst way possible of seeing all that is redeemable in white people, even when I'm clear that they don't extend us the same human courtesy.

I admit this. So this election is a reckoning for me, not so much over #WhichHillary, but over which versions of our black selves, our left selves, and our feminist selves we're going to be. For instance, will my left radical, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-militarist politics win, or will my pragmatic Southern black girl self that knows how this country is determine my vote? I'm not sure how the journey will go, but I will be guided fervently by who I want to be and what I want to see on the other side of November 2016.